The Fedora project, which is supported financially by Red Hat, has just released Fedora 9. The free distribution is based on kernel 2.6.25 and includes the KDE 4.0.3 and Gnome 2.22 desktops.

Xfce 4.4.2 completes the selection of desktops. Users will immediately notice the new look at the installation stage. The Anaconda installer can now resize partitions with Ext2/3 and NTFS filesystems, and is also capable of creating encrypted filesystems. The developers offer the Ext3 successor Ext4 as an optional filesystem.

NetworkManager 0.7 is enabled by default to handle connections to the outside world. Software management is handled by PackageKit which acts as a front-end for the underlying Yum tool.

Popular applications such as Firefox 3 Beta 5 and Open Office 2.4 are also included. The Release Notes have a full list of new features.

Users who keep to the pre-upgrade approach should be able to update their existing Fedora systems to version 9 without installation media, after downloading the required files. Otherwise, Fedora 9 is available for various systems and with various download options from the following website.